The Art and Craft of Writing Appreciations

As a film critic, my job rarely involves breaking news. Most weeks, I can make a schedule in advance and know exactly what I’m going to be doing at any given time. The only wild card is the celebrity death. When a Marlon Brando or a Katharine Hepburn or a Gregory Peck dies, all plans are canceled and the rush begins to make a big splash in the next day’s paper.

This is not something I enjoy doing by any stretch of the imagination. Yet it’s something I take seriously, in the sense that I recognize a newspaper’s function in the public’s grieving process. When a beloved celebrity dies, the public’s one consolation is getting to read about that celebrity the next day. For some celebrities, a day of mourning suffices. For others, two or three days are necessary.

The role of the critic, in this context, is to do two things: 1) To accurately fix the career in an historic context, to talk about the lasting achievements, etc.; and 2) To accentuate the positive. A day or two after someone’s death is not the time to be critical. If you’re delivering a funeral oration, you at least have to give the person the benefit of the doubt. This is not the time to say, “Other people love this guy, but I just thought he was OK.” This is rather the time to enter into the emotion of it, in order to provide a catharsis for other people’s feelings.

The death of Robert Altman last week was such an occasion. This is a director whose work I respect, but he has never been a favorite of mine. So in the appreciation, I wrote about what I respected in his work. It hardly matters if something chilly in Altman’s world view made it hard for me to warm up to him. The appreciation wasn’t about me. It was about him.

Another example: In September of 2005, I wrote an appreciation commemorating the 50th anniversary of James Dean‘s death. Now Dean is not an actor I particularly care about one way or the other. I recognize his talent and his immense importance, but I don’t have a visceral emotional response to his work. But that kind of personal information has no place in an appreciation. As I saw it, my task was to temporarily work myself up into a state in which I felt what I’d feel if I really did feel something, because in doing so I would also notice things in his work that I could pass on to the reader.

Now when that intensity of feeling is there for me already, the article is easier to write (though curiously, it doesn’t necessarily result in a better piece). I had that benefit in writing about Bob Hope, Hedy Lamarr, Robert Mitchum, Claudette Colbert and Greta Garbo just to name a few. Yet I think the best appreciation I’ve ever done for this newspaper was on Katharine Hepburn, an actress that I like just fine but have no special feeling about — at least not until she reached her sixties.

In the case of Hepburn, she died at exactly the worst time in terms of newspaper coverage. I had exactly two hours to write 50 inches about her, which basically meant writing about as fast as I could type. I got halfway through when I realized that the appreciation needed an emotional quality or else it would lie flat on the page, and people would stop reading. So at that point, I did an emotional substitution, as a Method actor might in approaching an emotional scene. I thought to myself, well, my mother-in-law is a little like Katharine Hepburn. My mother-in-law is great. I’ll just write about her. And so for a paragraph or two, I wrote about my mother-in-law, then looked it over and decided, yes. This applies to Katharine Hepburn, too. Let’s go with it.

In the end, I think the quality of an appreciation can be measured by how much it makes readers feel as if they’ve lost something, and how much it makes readers feel that they’ve benefited from someone having been alive. If it’s only about the cold transmission of information, something is missing.